For an emotional eater, giving up dieting can be terrifying. Suddenly there are no rules. You’re responsible for your own food choices, and you’re not sure you can be trusted. You may have struggled for years with lack of control around food. You may fear that Normal Eating can’t work for you, that you don’t have the ability to choose well. You may feel that the only possible way to control what you eat is through the external strictures of a diet.

The culture at large reinforces this fear. If you tell someone you’ve decided not to diet anymore, you’re likely to be told what a dangerous mistake you’re making, how natural appetites have no natural limits, and the only way to lose excess weight is through a diet. You’ve probably been told every day of your life that you’re not competent to choose your own food.

But it’s not true! Natural limits are part of our natural instincts. You just lose touch with your natural, internal controls when you become used to looking outside yourself for guidance. As you reconnect with yourself and learn to meet your needs in authentic ways, compulsion melts away and you are able to eat normally.

Normal Eating: Control From Within

Eating normally means eating as much as you want whenever you want, but it doesn’t mean eating without any limits or control. When you’re on a diet, control comes from external rules that are unrelated to hunger, satiation, or how different foods make your body feel. When you’re eating normally, controls come from within, from what your body is telling you it needs.

We are born knowing how to eat normally. An infant knows when she’s hungry, and knows when she’s had enough. If you try to put food into the mouth of an infant who is no longer hungry, she purses her lips and moves her head from side to side to avoid the spoon.

This body wisdom about what and how much you need to eat is still inside you – you just need to reconnect with it. You don’t need a diet to tell you what to eat. Animals in the wild manage to get exactly the nutrition they need. Have you ever seen a fat deer in the woods? We are born with this same body wisdom.

People with a history of compulsive eating are often so disconnected from their natural internal controls that they don’t even know when they’re hungry. A primary goal of Normal Eating is to put you back in touch with your own inner wisdom, and show you that you can trust it. (The other main goal of Normal Eating is to redirect the emotional needs behind cravings – check out the archives for more on that.)

Learning to Trust Yourself

Learning to trust yourself is key in Normal Eating, and I’m not just talking about eating choices. We are integrated beings. Either we trust ourselves, or we don’t. If you distrust yourself in one area, you will tend to distrust yourself in all areas – food, relationships, money, or whatever.

Happily, the spillover effect goes both ways. As you develop self-trust around food, you will trust yourself more in other areas. With self-trust comes self-respect, since you can’t trust yourself if you don’t respect yourself. And self-respect is the foundation of self-love. Just as you can’t love a partner you don’t respect, you can’t love yourself without respecting yourself. When you love yourself, you’ll take care of yourself. And when your needs are met, you won’t need to self-soothe with food. It all starts with trusting yourself!

Some newcomers to Normal Eating have likened the decision to stop dieting to jumping off a cliff with no parachute. But as they work through the Normal Eating stages they discover, to their surprise, that they can fly.

Please post your thoughts and experiences. I’d love to hear from you!

Today’s post will be somewhat personal because I’ve been quite sick. The problem, as usual, is my digestive system – the ulcerative colitis that originally inspired the Normal Eating method. When an emotional eater has health-mandated eating restrictions, he or she must resolve emotional eating in a very deep way to avoid getting triggered. And thus the Normal Eating method was born.

This time around my challenge was a little different. I wasn’t trying to follow a special diet that I hoped would cure me (though I did make certain changes I’ll talk about shortly). I was – and am – taking a drug that I know from past experience causes pronounced increase in appetite and water retention, potentially leading to rapid weight gain and "moonface" (puffed out cheeks): the dreaded Prednisone.

First key point: When you are sick enough to need this drug, it puts the importance of appearance in perspective. When you are so sick that you cannot leave home or enjoy life at all, a fast 20 pound weight gain and a head like a basketball seems a small price to pay to be functional and pain-free. That said, I did not gain 20 pounds this time.

When Your Body Betrays You

The first time my doctor put me on Prednisone for colitis, I wasn’t forewarned about the increased appetite and water retention. I felt endlessly hungry so I endlessly ate. I gained weight very quickly, and my usually oval face became perfectly round. People I knew didn’t recognize me. I didn’t realize how much my appearance had changed until I saw myself in a photograph, and then I cried.

The worst part was not actually the weight gain, but the moonface – the puffed out cheeks from water retention. I didn’t feel pretty anymore, but moreover I didn’t feel like me anymore. I felt like I was in someone else’s body.

My overwhelming feeling this time around was that I didn’t want to put myself through that again. I wanted to spare myself the pain of reliving that experience. My main thought was PROTECT: Protect self from pain.

This is important because how you think about your food choices has everything to do with how you feel about them. What you do out of self-love and self-protection is freely chosen and empowering. Then it’s not about the food you’ve chosen to eat or not eat, it’s about the benefit you want to give yourself. You’re moving towards something, not away from something. Your main focus is not the food, but rather the goal you are trying to achieve (incidentally, through food choices).

Freely Choosing

How do you get to the point where you can freely make food choices in your own best interest, without feelings of conflict or deprivation? In the end, it comes down to how you think about it – what you say to yourself in the moment when you are deciding what you will or will not eat.

What I said to myself was, "This is war, and I am fighting for my life. I am going to get well, and I am going to do it on my own terms, without losing my physical sense of self, to the extent it is possible for me to control this."

I’ve been able to minimize the Prednisone side effects this time because I have developed the inner freedom to make food choices that feel like choices, exercises of personal power, and not restrictions imposed from without. I was able to decide what to eat without any sense of inner conflict. This is what the Normal Eating method is all about.

I also learned some interesting things along the way.

Mindfulness versus Habit

When I started the Prednisone, I became very conscious and deliberate about what I chose to put in my mouth, much more so than before. My strategy was this:

• Pay scrupulous attention to hunger and satiation. Know that my body’s cues are distorted because of the drug, and eat the bare minimum needed to satisfy hunger.
• Avoid foods with high calorie density and low nutrition (e.g. sweets) because my body is leading me to eat more than it really needs. Don’t go hungry, but minimize foods that will encourage fast weight gain.
• Minimize salt to reduce water retention.

At first it was easy – the Prednisone hunger doesn’t happen immediately. And I had a surprising realization: I’d been eating slightly more than my body needed, simply out of habit. For example, I didn’t need a whole bagel at breakfast. My body only wanted half that.

I’ve always gained weight easily, but much more so since turning 50. I weight 10-15 pounds more now than I did at 30. Until this exercise in hypermindfulness, I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. I wasn’t eating emotionally or compulsively – I was eating what I always had eaten. But I weighed more.

Now I realize that this was the problem. I was eating what I always had eaten, but my body was not as it always had been. I was older and had less muscle mass. Perhaps I also moved less. I wasn’t eating to fill emotional needs, but in eating out of habit I was not fully eating according to my body’s hunger and satiation cues. It turns out that going on autopilot is a great way to gain weight with age!

In the first two weeks of my hyper-mindful eating, I actually lost 5 pounds. I gained this back when the relentless Prednisone hunger kicked in, but the gain stopped at the 5 pounds I lost.

I’m now starting to taper off the Prednisone, and my only side effect has been a slight moonface and hoarseness from the water retention. Maybe when I’m off the Prednisone my weight will return to what it was when I was 30, just by paying more attention to my body and not eating out of habit. That would be nice.

Age, Beauty, and Health

All things being equal, everybody would prefer a vigorous, healthy, youthful, normal-weight body. After all, this defines beauty. We are genetically programmed to be attracted to health. A youthful shape signals reproductive capability.

But all things are not equal.

If you are over 50, you’ve probably noticed that your proportions have changed, even if your weight has not. I always used to be a full size smaller on top than on the bottom, no matter what my weight. That is no longer true. Suddenly I’m bigger on top. People tend to get thicker around the waist with age.

This doesn’t only apply to women, but as an example, look at pictures of Betty White over time. Notice what happens to her figure as she ages. She doesn’t get fat, but she gets thicker around the middle and other things shift and change. That’s part of life, and to stress about it is a waste of energy. It’s self-respecting to look the best we can, but beauty is not the most important thing in life and, as we get older, it becomes increasingly out of reach.

On the plus side, though appearance doesn’t improve with age, wisdom and peace of mind do. I may have looked better at 30, but I’m a lot happier at 54. And everybody else I know in my age group feels the same way.

But most important is this: No matter what your age, if you are healthy, you are blessed. If you’ve never been seriously ill, you don’t fully realize how blessed.

Honor yourself by looking your best, but try to keep it in perspective. It’s not the most important thing.

Please post your thoughts and experiences. I’d love to hear from you!

Emotional eaters often feel enormous guilt about eating – and especially enjoyment of eating. This may seem like a small matter, but in fact guilt-free enjoyment of food is a key factor in recovery. From my book, Normal Eating® for Normal Weight:

Our modern society views enjoyment of eating in much the same way as Victorians viewed enjoyment of sex – dangerous and sinful, something to feel guilty about. It’s considered almost obscene not to be on a diet that restricts what you eat.

A few weeks ago, someone posted a message in the forum with the subject "Mindful eating feels like a punishment". Here’s an excerpt from it:

I found myself really irritated that I was hungry again this afternoon. It wasn’t because I didn’t want food or didn’t know what I wanted it was because I was busy and didn’t want to take the time to sit down and eat mindfully. I kept thinking about the things I needed to get done and the things I wanted to do knowing that by stopping to eat mindfully every time I’m hungry I won’t have time to do it all. … I rushed through and stopped eating when I was still slightly hungry because I wanted to be done and get on with my day.

Her post reminded me of a blog entry I wrote, “5 Reasons Emotional Eaters Shun Mindfulness“, and made me realize there was a 6th reason. It almost sounded like she didn’t want to allow herself to enjoy eating, that she wanted to approach it as a perfunctory thing to get out of the way. She’s not alone in this. I’ve seen this same sentiment expressed many times by people in early recovery from emotional eating.

Eating is one of the great pleasures of life. Getting hungry is a wonderful opportunity for a sensual, enjoyable experience. But emotional eaters often feel guilty about eating or (worse) getting pleasure from eating. They don’t allow themselves to enjoy their meals. When I posted this in the forum thread, another member posted this response:

Sheryl, I LOVE this. It really resonates for me and explains much of why I have puzzled with Mindful eating. It is not so much the drug inducing factor of it, but much more this thing about pleasure, allowing it, seeing as a good thing. I have quite a strong "depriving" streak in me, that has kept me tough and functioning for a long time, and I think that part struggles with the simple, sensuous pleasure that is eating. I will really take this away as treasure to think about.

What about you? Does this resonate? Do you allow yourself to enjoy your meals? Do you allow yourself pleasusre in general? Or do you tend to deprive yourself while taking care of everyone else?

Something to Try…

The bedrock of Normal Eating – the key learning that makes it possible – is the deep knowledge that you have the right to pleasure and happiness. When you become convinced of this, you start to act on your own behalf in all areas of life. And then you no longer need food band-aids.

Often emotional eaters are people pleasers. They want every around them to be comfortable and happy, and pay more attention to that than their own needs. Then, because their needs go unfilled, they use food to fill the Big Empty and give themselves generic comfort and pleasure. Or sometimes people just feel so badly about themselves that they won’t raise a finger to help themselves.

One of the issues that comes up frequently with my coaching clients is that every minute of the day is either spent working, or taking care of other people – no time for themselves. So by the end of the day they are tired and spent, and they eat. Often this is the first time they’ve had to themselves all day, the first opportunity to relax, the first time since they got up that they’ve done something just for themselves.

Does this sound like you? Are you all work and no play, and then at the end of the day you eat to unwind? If so, find an hour a day – well before bedtime – that is totally yours. Do you think you can’t, that you don’t have time? That means you really need to do this. Take a real lunch break. Go sit outside or take a walk. If you are caring for kids, think about who might watch them for an hour while you take time to be a human being.

The more you think there is no time and you can’t do this, the more you need to find a way to do this. You’re not a super-hero. If you deny your basic needs, you’ll end up eating to feel better.

Please post your thoughts and experiences! I’d love to hear from you.

There are many reasons that people continue eating after they are no longer hungry. Here’s the short list:

• You don’t recognize satiation cues. You don’t recognize that you’re no longer hungry until you are past full.
• It bothers you to leave food on your plate. The reasons for this can run deep, as you’ll soon see.
• The food tastes good and you want to continue experiencing that. But what aren’t you paying attention to?
• You are in the grip of compulsion. You don’t want it, it doesn’t taste good, but you can’t stop.

You Don’t Recognize Satiation Cues

When emotional eaters start paying attention to hunger and satiation cues, they’re often startled to realize that they can’t recognize when they’re hungry or – harder yet – when they’ve had enough. It’s not surprising, when you think about it. When you eat for reasons other than hunger, you ignore these cues. After a while, you almost forget where to look for them.

When you first start asking yourself if you’re hungry or if you’re full, it’s frustrating to get the answer back, "I don’t know." But keep asking. Eventually, you will know. It’s only by continually trying to reconnect with your hunger and satiation cues that finally you will. The inner cues are still there – you just need to learn to listen again.

You Feel You Must Clean Your Plate

The crux of the "clean your plate" issue is eating according to internal cues rather than external cues – stopping when your body says to stop, rather than when your plate is empty. To some extent, the urge to eat everything on your plate is related to being disconnected from your hunger and satiation cues. But there’s more to it.

As I’m sure you’ve experienced, sometimes you keep eating when you are well aware that you are no longer hungry, and in fact you’re starting to feel uncomfortable. But as long as there is food on your plate, you feel the urge to continue eating until it’s all gone. What’s that about?

This is actually a self-esteem issue – a particular aspect of self-esteem. It’s about feeling entitled to leave food on your plate – knowing you have the right to eat according to internal signals rather than external mandates, and you’re entitled to throw away food. If you’ve spent years eating according to someone else’s rules – or at least trying – then you don’t know in your heart that you have the right to eat according to your own inner directives.

Somehow, in the mind of an emotional eater, the food on the plate becomes work to complete – something you must accomplish. You can feel this way even if you’ve served yourself, put the food on the plate yourself.

An easy out, if you’re serving yourself, is to simply put less on your plate and go back for more if you’re still hungry. But the more general solution is to know that you are entitled to throw away food. Your body is not a garbage can. If you are no longer hungry, it is better to throw the food in the garbage than down your own throat. You have the right to throw away food. You are entitled to do this! You are more important than the food.

The Food Tastes Good

If you continue to eat past full just because the food tastes good, then you are in the "neck-up" trap. You are ignoring all aspects of your body and physical experience except what’s happening in your mouth.

The experience of eating isn’t just about taste. Your entire body experiences eating. What you eat affects your emotions, your energy level, and creates physical sensations in your belly and bowels. When you’re cut off from your whole body experience – and if you hate your own body, you surely are – then you focus only on what’s happening above the neck. You experience yourself as a floating head. There are taste buds, and then the rest you ignore as best you’re able. That is how you can focus on the pleasure of taste while ignoring the discomfort signals in other parts of your body.

In Stage 2 of Normal Eating I talk about being mindful when you eat. I’m not just talking about mindfulness of your mouth experience. I’m talking about your whole body experience. It’s by reconnecting with your whole body experience that you can align the drive for pleasure with your own best interest.

You Just Can’t Stop

And then there is the situation when you are eating crap and just can’t stop. Maybe you’re bingeing in the middle of the night, eating whatever happens to be available – a jar of peanut butter or cake frosting, or something even less delectable. But you can’t stop. You’re hating yourself, you feel sick and full and you don’t even like what you’re eating, but you can’t stop.

Emotional eating is not about the food – it’s never about the food. That’s why dieting doesn’t work. Dieting is all about the food – what you are eating. But emotional eating is about something else, and if you don’t address this "something else", you will continue to do it. No type of eating past full makes this key fact more clear than the "just can’t stop" situation, when you’re eating something you don’t like and don’t want, but you can’t stop doing it.

What you need to do when you just can stop is to pause. Pause. Even if it’s for five minutes. Or one minute. For however long you can do it, pause. Pause in your anxiety and discomfort and feel your feelings. Let it all bubble up and live your own truth. Stand in your own real experience and be you, living your life. Don’t be afraid. Cry, scream, whatever you need to do, but feel your own authentic self. You’ll probably start thinking about some aspect of your life that’s really bothering you. That is your trigger – the real problem that you are trying to stuff down with food. It’s almost impossible to surface what’s triggering a binge unless you pause in the midst of the craving.

Pausing in the midst of craving is a crucial part of recovery in Normal Eating. I wrote more about this in a previous blog post, The Importance of the Pause. And of course I address it at length in my book, Normal Eating for Normal Weight.

Something to Try

Here are some skills to practice so eventually you can stop eating when you are no longer hungry:

• Eat mindfully. By this I don’t just mean pay attention to your mouth experience. Pay attention to your whole body experience. Notice how eating makes you feel throughout your body, and emotionally as well. Keep asking yourself, "Am I still hungry?"
• Monitor your thoughts. If you feel like you "should" clean your plate, remind yourself that you are more valuable and important than this food, and you are entitled to throw it out.

• Pause in the heat of the moment. When you are in the grip of compulsion and craving, notice it and pause. You may very well continue eating after the pause, but even a pause of one minute or five minutes strengthens your "emotional muscle", preparing you to be able to stop in the future. A baby doesn’t learn to walk by leaping from the crib. First, it crawls. Similarly, you can’t stop emotional eating until you are first able to pause.

  So practice pausing, and feel proud of however long you are able to do it. Even if you end up eating afterwards, you have made progress. Those minutes you paused are minutes of genuine recovery.

Please post your thoughts and experiences! I’d love to hear from you.

Most of us don’t live in isolation. The people closest to you usually know all about your struggles with weight and eating, and can have a profound effect on your Normal Eating journey.

When you’re coming from the diet world, you’re coming from a world in which it’s assumed that you don’t have the self-control or judgment to manage your eating on your own. At one time or another, you may even have recruited friends and family to help you stick to your diet and monitor what you eat.

But in Normal Eating, taking full responsibility for your eating choices is crucial. Normal Eating teaches you to trust yourself – teaches you that you can trust yourself. So when you stop dieting and make the shift to Normal Eating, the "helpful" interjections from family and friends to not eat this or that are no longer welcome – and in fact, interfere with your progress.

The people close to you can sidetrack your efforts in more subtle ways, as well. Whenever someone changes – even when the change is positive – there will be some resistance to the change from those close to the person.

Resistance to Change – Any Change

A shared problem – such as a shared struggle with weight – is the basis of many friendships. Remove the problem, and suddenly the relationship is threatened. What do you talk about now? If you lose weight, will it make the the other person feel bad about herself or himself?

Simply the shift in long-established roles can destabilize a relationship. You’d think that becoming a stronger more self-confident person could only help your relationships, but it can cause unexpected tensions. When one person changes, habitual ways of interacting no longer work. That threatens the relationship until a new equilibrium can be reached.

A normal weight friend may be used to seeing you as nonthreatening around the opposite sex, and suddenly you’re a competitor. Or a friendship may have been based on helping the fat friend who can never quite solve the problem. Then you suddenly solve the problem. What then? So the people close to you will frequently try to prevent you from changing.

It’s not because they are mean or bad or don’t want the best for you. It’s a natural resistance to what is initially perceived as a threat to the relationship. And in a way it is, because to continue forward, your relationship will have to shift.

You move the relationship into its new, healthier mode by setting healthy boundaries – and by recognizing that resistance to change is natural and nothing to fear. In the vast majority of situations, people will come around.

Something to Try…

The first situation I described – friends and family monitoring what you eat – is the easier situation to deal with, which is not to say it’s easy! What you need to do may be difficult, but at least it’s clear.

You need to explain to friends and family that you’ve had some realizations. A permanent solution to your struggles with eating and weight involves taking full responsibility for your own eating. Explain that the best way they can help you is to never comment on what you eat, and trust you to work it out for yourself. This kind of self assertion can be hard, but it’s essential.

The second situation – the subtle social pressures that work against personal change – is a more difficult challenge. Emotions can run deep on both sides. Your most potent weapon is awareness.

Notice when someone who loves you responds to your weight loss by trying to get you to eat. Perhaps they are suddenly worried about your getting "too thin" (when you know, objectively, this is not the case). Or maybe they are suddenly presenting you with special treats that you just "have to" try.

In particular, be on the alert for feelings of guilt. Is someone making you feel guilty about doing what you need to do to take care of yourself?

With awareness, you can create some distance from the emotions of the situation. Never feel guilty for self-care or making your own eating choices – this is not only your right, but one of your fundamental responsibilities in life. Just as you have the right to eat something, you have the right not to eat something. You are never obligated to eat what’s put in front of you just to protect someone else’s feelings – never. You need to know this in your heart.

Are you wobbly about your rights and responsibilities? Check out the chapter on Healthy Boundaries in Normal Eating for Normal Weight.

Please post your thoughts and experiences!

A few days ago, director and comedian Kevin Smith was thrown off a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. He’s been speaking out about it, calling it “humiliating” and “the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” Two days ago on Mardi Gras (aka Fat Tuesday), late night comedian Craig Ferguson made fat prejudice the subject of his monologue. It is hilarious.

Do you eat because it’s time to eat, whether you’re hungry or not? A lot of people do, and then feel crappy afterwards.

If the goal is to eat when you’re hungry, does that mean regular meal times are out? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. But figuring out how to make your hunger coincide with meal times is actually a skill. People trying to stop emotional eating probably won’t be able to do this immediately.

If you’re a parent, you’ve heard the debate about whether to feed babies “on demand” (when they cry to be fed – i.e. when they are hungry), or on a schedule (at regular meal times, regardless of whether they are hungry).

A schedule is more convenient for the parent, but infants should be fed on demand until they are old enough to speak and understand the concept of meal times. Before that, if they cry and aren’t fed they just feel like they’re being starved. This can lead to emotional eating issues later in life.

Also, infants can’t regulate their intake to accomodate meal times. The same can be said for an emotional eater in early recovery.

Eating at regular meal times has some advantages. If you work outside the home during the day, you may have preset lunch or dinner hours. If you don’t eat then, you don’t have another chance until you get off work. There is also the social aspect of eating with family and friends. You can’t enjoy dinner with others unless you schedule the meal in advance, and then arrange to be hungry at that time.

But once eating becomes disconnected from hunger, meal times become just an excuse for recreational eating, a habit that no longer serves a function. The reason for scheduling meal times is to free you to do other things at non-meal times. If you’re eating between meals as well as at meals, there is no point to the scheduled meals.

Something to Try…

The best way to break out of this habit is to go back to on-demand eating for a while. Ignore conventional meal times to the extent that your schedule allows, and eat the way infants eat – when you’re hungry. Try this for at least a month, and see how it feels.

Once you get used to eating for hunger, you can slowly work your way back to regular meal times, if this is convenient for you. Note that eating at regular meal times means not eating between meals! With practice, you’ll learn how much you need to eat at each meal to hold you until the next meal. You’ll also find that to be hungry for breakfast, you must stop eating at a certain point in the evening. (This also can help you to sleep better.)

Do you eat at meal times and between meal times, as well? How does it feel to eat “on demand”, independent of conventional meal times?

The end of the year is a time to review and take stock. The news media recounts the major events of the last 12 months, and makes lists of the public figures who have died. And we, as individuals, think about our own lives. What happened to us over the last year? What went right? What went wrong? What can we do to make next year better?

Even after good years there is always a little sadness because the passage of time reminds us we are mortal. So resolutions for the new year inevitably involve renewed commitment to healthy habits: quit smoking, exercise more, lose weight. Unsurprisingly, given that the new year comes after a month of heavy holiday eating, a commitment to lose weight is the most common new year resolution of all.

For most people, the commitment doesn’t last. Good intentions translate into a burst of short-term effort followed by discouragement, self-recrimination, and finally giving up. You stop even trying, for a while, anyway.

It doesn’t have to be like that.

Here are the secrets to turning your new year resolutions into your new reality:

1. Put your efforts in the right direction. Don’t waste time on another diet. Fix the underlying problem – the compulsion to eat when you’re not hungry. If 90% of your eating involves moderate amounts of nutritious food, you will be your normal weight. Everyone knows what this means. You eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, and eat mainly fresh, unprocessed food. If you know what to do and you’re not doing it, the problem is compulsion, and this is not solved by a diet.
2. Approach the problem with the right attitude. The fix is not going to be quick or easy, and anyone who promises that it will be is lying. Emotional eating is a very difficult problem to fix. If it weren’t, you’d have solved it already. Overeating makes you miserable and you’ve been trying for years to stop. So don’t expect to instantly shed your compulsion, and lose at the rate of a pound a day. It sounds extreme when I put it that way, but people really do weigh themselves every morning and feel despair if another pound isn’t gone!
3. Believe that you can do this, because you can. The solution isn’t quick or easy, but it’s achievable, and not just for others. You can do this. As long as you believe this core truth, you will keep trying until you reach your goal. The only way you can fail is if you stop trying. One common reason for discouragement is the unrealistic expectation of a quick and easy fix. Another is the habit of not believing in yourself – something that the Normal Eating method addresses directly.
4. Have patience; learn to take pride in small steps forward. I can’t tell you how many people have joined the Normal Eating Support Group and expect to be able to eat when hungry and stop when full on the first day – or at least by the end of the first week. It doesn’t work that way! That’s where you get at the end of the process, it’s not where you start. Recovery is a journey. Learn to enjoy each step along the way. Life is about the journey, not the destination.
5. Use every tool available to you, and don’t hesitate to ask for help. Compulsive eating is a hard problem – a very hard problem. One interesting result of the Emotional Eating Test I posted last month was the answer to this question: “I feel like I should be able to solve my weight problem without help.” Three-quarters of both men and women answered “yes” to this question! I’ve observed many times over the years that those who post the most in the Normal Eating Support Group tend to make the fastest progress. This is because they’re willing to ask for help.

If you’re an emotional eater, 2010 probably isn’t the first year you’ve promised yourself to lose weight and get in shape once and for all. But it can be the first year you keep this promise. You can achieve the goal of looking your best, and finally feeling comfortable in your own body.

Something to Try…

Psychologists have done studies comparing high achievers to low achievers, trying to divine the secrets to the high achievers’ success. One consistent difference is that high achievers set goals that are just slightly beyond where they are now. The goals are a stretch, but clearly within reach. Low achievers, in contrast, tend to set stratospheric goals. For example, a high achieving college student might have as a career goal a good paying job in her field of study. For a low achieving student, the goal might be wealth and fame.

Setting achievable goals is the key to success. With that in mind, what are your goals – your resolutions – for the next month, the next 6 months, and the next year? Make three lists, and then imagine yourself doing what it takes to reach your goals. Are your goals realistic? Can you visualize yourself doing what it takes to get there? Are you willing to put in the work? If so, you can turn your resolutions into reality.

Please share your lists and post your thoughts here!

Are you an emotional eater? If so, what are the reasons you eat? Are you mainly soothing negative emotions, or do you eat primary to distract yourself from the real problems in your life? How does being fat affect your view of yourself, and perhaps even serve you?

Take the test and find out! After you’ve completed the test, you’ll get:

• An interpretation of your own answers.
• A summary of how others answered, shown separately for men and women.

Men and women both struggle with emotional eating, but they may eat for different reasons – as the summary stats will reveal. (You may have to come back to check the summary stats. The test was just posted so the counts are still low.)

After you take the test, come back here and post a comment saying what you thought of it. Was it informative? Did the interpretation seem right? Were you surprised at the scores of men versus women?

Today is the day after Halloween and candy leftovers abound. Are you locked in a war with yourself about eating it? Here’s how to take the power out of the candy and put it back in you, where it belongs.

The crucial shift is in your attitude. You must know on a deep level – not just intellectually, but emotionally – that you have the right to eat whatever you want. This is true no matter what your current weight. If you feel your rights are constrained by societal mandates – that others can tell you what you should or shouldn’t eat – you’ll stay stuck in a childlike mindset, either doing as you’re told or rebelling against it. Only people with the right to choose can make choices. You can’t freely choose to forego candy or eat a salad unless you understand you have the right to make either choice.

This understanding – this crucial shift in attitude – is the primary goal in Stage 1 of Normal Eating. Recognizing your right to choose won’t make all cravings go away – there’s more fueling emotional eating than just feelings of deprivation – but it will help. And understanding you have this right forms the foundation for progress in later stages.

Note that simply eating a food does not mean you know you have the right to eat it. Someone in the forum posted this recently:

To me, it seems that the goal of Stage 1 is to understand that you are allowed to eat whatever you want. Since I am struggling with bingeing right now, I think I have the “eat whatever you want” part down pat.

Actually, if you’re bingeing, it’s highly unlikely you have the “eat whatever you want part down pat." Usually people who are bingeing feel wracked with guilt about their eating and filled with self-condemnation. They don’t feel at all like they have the right to be doing what they’re doing. And the self-flagellation that goes along with bingeing tends to perpetuate the cycle.

Stage 1 of Normal Eating is not something you eat your way through, it’s something you think your way through. If you eat something and feel guilty about it, you have not not progressed in Stage 1. What’s important isn’t whether you let yourself eat a particular food, but what you say to yourself about eating it. You may actually eat it or you may not – that’s not what’s important.

The goal of Normal Eating is to stop being at war with yourself, where one part of you is pulling you one way, and another part of you is beating the crap out of yourself for it. The first step in the recovery process is to eliminate the false parent you’re rebelling against – the "shoulds" in your head. There are no "shoulds" when it comes to eating; you have the right to make whatever eating choices you want.

Your Body, Your Life

You can know intellectually that you have this right, yet find it hard to accept emotionally – especially if you’re fat. Our society can make fat people feel ashamed of eating anything at all. From someone else in the forum:

I understand the concept that I have the right to eat what I choose. I get that, and I agree with it. However, I feel guilty about EVERYTHING that I eat. Healthy food, junk food, all of it.
…
I have to live in a world where I am ostracized for how I look.

The solution to this may surprise you: Recognize that you have the right to be fat. It is your body, your life, and no one has the right to tell you what to do with either. This is a core boundary issue.

Now, perhaps you don’t choose to be fat. Perhaps you are fat because you are driven by compulsion and unable to make true choices. You still have the right to be fat! The goal of the Normal Eating program is to free you from compulsion so you can make choices. But one of these choices may be that you prefer eating what you want over being thin. That is a legimate choice for you to make about your life. Or you may not choose to be as large as you are now, but down the road you may decide you prefer to eat cookies and be a size 12 than eat no sweets and be a size 0. That is a legitimate choice, too, and your right. No one else has the right to tell you how much you can weigh. It’s simply none of their business.

There still may be fat bigots who ostracize you – nothing to be done about them. But at least you can stop ostracizing yourself. That will help quite a bit. Most fat people say horrible things to themselves. It’s important to monitor your self-talk and stop doing that. There is only one person whose opinion of you really matters, and that is you. If you don’t feel good about yourself as a fat person, losing weight will not fix this. In fact, it’s the reverse. You must feel good about yourself in order to give yourself the gift of a healthy body.

Some proponents of the non-diet approach say it’s okay to eat whatever you want because there is no such thing as a “fattening food”, that it’s just a matter of how much you eat. This isn’t completely correct. There are fattening foods: Nutrient-empty snacks and desserts loaded with quick-digesting carbs are fattening – not because of their calories, but because of their effect on your hormones (see my post on the real cause of obesity). Granted you won’t gain weight from one bite of a brownie, but that’s not the point.

You have the right to eat whatever you want, regardless of whether the food is fattening, because you have the right to be fat. You have the right to do whatever you want with your own body, without limitation. You even have the right to eat in a way that kills you, though you probably will choose not to do this once you reach Stage 4 and become able to make choices. The main point is this: Your right to choose what you eat is absolute. This is your body and your life.

Something to Try…

If you are feeling plagued by your leftover Halloween candy – or if you’re at war with yourself over eating any other type of food – try this novel approach:

• Constantly tell yourself – every time you even think about eating something – that you have the right to eat whatever you want. This needs to become a refrain in your head that you repeat constantly, to counteract the constant cultural pressure in the other direction.
• Ask yourself this very important question: Do I want to eat this right now – do I truly feel like eating it? The answer might be yes, or it might be no. Either way is fine. What’s important is that you ask yourself the question to reinforce in your mind that it is a choice.
• If you decide to eat it, don’t scarf it down so fast that 10 seconds later it’s like it never happened. That’s guilty eating. If you’re going to eat it, enjoy it, savor it. Eat it mindfully. (And if that’s hard, check out this previous post: 5 Reasons Emotional Eaters Shun Mindfulness.)

After you’ve tried this, please report back! How did it feel to do that? Do you feel your attitudes shifting, on an emotional level? Do you feel angry about societal pressure to take away your right to eat what you want? Did the shift in your thinking cause your eating to change at all?